The key to a proper PvP Ranking System is to rank a player on "How Good They Are", and NOT, repeat NOT on "How Much They Play SWTOR."

To repeat once more, so no one misses it: Time should never affect your rank. Ever.

How to Design a PvP Ranking System

Player-based, not Character-based

The first radical idea, is that the Ranking system should be player based (i.e. account based), not character based. This way, it is ranking the Player, not a "character". This means you can't start a new character with 0 rank and go "pwn n00bs" in the lower brackets, and also means you don't have to "re-rank" your alts just to get back into the brackets you're accustomed to. Win-win for everyone.

Two ranks: Personal Rank, and Team Rank

Instead of just 1 rank, you'll have 2. A Personal rank, and a Team rank. Personal rank is affected by certain actions you, personally take in PvP. Team rank is affected by the mini game environment/objectives. Example: personal rank could factor in kills, deaths, etc. whereas Team rank could factor in defender badges (or special new badges which are obtained specifically by defending objectives), taking objectives, end score (win or lose), etc.

If you queue solo, it uses Personal Rank to match you with others.

If you queue pre-made, it uses Team Rank to match you with others.

The great thing is, you can then CHOOSE which Rank you want to focus on/be good at.

- Are you a team player? Focus on the mini game objectives only, regardless of your badge count or how much you "pwn" people, and you'll be able to keep a high Team Rank.

- Don't give a !@#$%^ about the mini games and just want to "pwn" people and be recognized as a deadly/skilled opponent? Focus on the things that raise your Personal Rank.

- Want to be the best of the best? Focus on both at once. Only the truly elite will have high personal *and* team ranks. Worship these players.

Again, win-win for different types of PvP players.

Rank based on Statistical Average, not Accumulation

Accumulation-based Ranking means the more you play, the higher your rank will be, and that violates what I said earlier. An adult with a job who plays less often than a kid with no job may be better, but an accumulation-based ranking system would mean the adult could never, ever rank as high as the kid.

Instead, ranking will use a statistical average-based system. The system will record the results of every match, for 10 matches. Until you've played 10, you are "Unranked". After 10 matches (remember, on any character, doesn't matter), you obtain your rank, which is a statistical average of those 10 matches. This will then become a "rolling-10-match-window". Meaning, when you play your 11th match, the system will now use matches 2-11 for your rank. When you play 12th match, its 3rd-12th, etc. i.e. your LAST 10 matches determine the Rank.

This means that the person who plays 10 matches a DAY will be measured IN THE SAME WAY that a person who plays 10 matches a WEEK is measured - objectively, based on RESULTS. It also means that your Rank will never Decay due to not playing SWTOR, or not playing "enough". That's just marketing/sales B.S. to drive up revenue for the company. No thanks.

The other neat thing is that since its a rolling-10-match window, it introduces a nice bell curve in the rankings. i.e. Lose just 1 match, and it takes 10 wins in a row to regain Rank 10. You'll need to keep 1 loss in 10 to maintain rank 9 (really hard). You'll need only 2 losses in 10 to maintain Rank 8. etc. The good players will hover above the mid point of 5, the bad ones below 5, while most people will hover around 5.

Queues

The game will attempt to match you with other solo/teams with same or close rank. Perhaps 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 7-8, 9-10 brackets. Whatever. The point is, if you wait too long in the "Ranked Queue", it will offer you a non-ranked match (and clearly TELL you its doing so) so that you don't sit around forever waiting for a match.

As always, feedback is appreciated.

So basically we're taking a bunch of pages out of the League of Legends system? That's not really a terrible idea. Basically that's the way it works. Your rank goes up or down depending on whether you win or lose, how you perform and the ranks of those you're playing against. It doesn't matter how long you've played, you can just lose and lose and lose if you aren't any good and your ranking will go down. They also have a completely separate rank for solo queues VS group queues, although ranking is still influenced by individual performance in both.

Now, I haven't played this game in a while, but that's how their system works as I understand it and it really isn't too bad. The problem is matchmaking. If you don't have enough players on a server to match people based on their ranks (and I'm betting SWTOR does not, seeing as I run into the same people over and over on a high population server), the ranks won't actually make much difference. You either won't get queues because there's no one available in your ranking bracket, or you'll end up getting shoved in against superior/inferior players because those are all that are available.

So basically we're taking a bunch of pages out of the League of Legends system? That's not really a terrible idea. Basically that's the way it works. Your rank goes up or down depending on whether you win or lose, how you perform and the ranks of those you're playing against. It doesn't matter how long you've played, you can just lose and lose and lose if you aren't any good and your ranking will go down. They also have a completely separate rank for solo queues VS group queues, although ranking is still influenced by individual performance in both.

 

Now, I haven't played this game in a while, but that's how their system works as I understand it and it really isn't too bad. The problem is matchmaking. If you don't have enough players on a server to match people based on their ranks (and I'm betting SWTOR does not, seeing as I run into the same people over and over on a high population server), the ranks won't actually make much difference. You either won't get queues because there's no one available in your ranking bracket, or you'll end up getting shoved in against superior/inferior players because those are all that are available.

One idea is that the queue system attempts to "rank-match", for a Ranked Game. If none are available after some time limit, it will "non-rank-match' you for a non-ranked game. Obviously, the Pop-up window, and also the splash screen, has to clearly tell you this so you know what kind of match you're entering, and can decline if you want to.

fixed the op for the queue idea.

Any other feedback? Where is the community people keep talkin about here?

If the current SWTOR medal system hasn't taught you that attempting to rank individuals on specific triggers in a Warzone isn't a bad idea you are either not paying attention, or not playing the game.

Let me quote the part of my idea which said we should use the existing medal system, as is, with no changes, for ranking:

""

Any other retarded posts you wanna make?

Let me quote the part of my idea which said we should use the existing medal system, as is, with no changes, for ranking:

 

""

 

Any other retarded posts you wanna make?

Personal rank is affected by certain actions you, personally take in PvP. Team rank is affected by the mini game environment/objectives. Example: personal rank could factor in kills, deaths, etc. whereas Team rank could factor in defender badges, end score (win or lose), etc.

Oh hey, lookie there.

Sounds just like the current system.

Don't mind me though, I'll just be standing over here in the green goo spamming heals on myself for extra medals.

Any other retarded posts you wanna make?

Oh hey, lookie there.

Sounds just like the current system.

End score grants medals? Hint: to enter a warzone, click the icon in the lower right corner of the minimap. You might enjoy Warzones, you know, since you've never been in one.

Also, please google "etc." and let us know what you discover.

Lastly, I edited the OP to make it clearer for the .... not so IQ endowed ... ahem ... such as yourself.

End score grants medals? Hint: to enter a warzone, click the icon in the lower right corner of the minimap. You might enjoy Warzones, you know, since you've never been in one.

 

Also, please google "etc." and let us know what you discover.

The point I am trying to make, my thick headed friend, is that incentivizing people to play as individuals in a team game is a very poor mechanic and leads to people gaming the system to inflate their "score" as seen with the current SWTOR medal system.

I'm sorry you failed to make the simple connection on your own, I will try to dumb my posts down for you.

OP has some good ideas. However, I will not participate in ranked warzones until Bioware lets us queue a full group of 8. I am tired of going into a warzone with 3 other guild members, and halfway through the fight realizing that we are the only people attempting to win while others randomly pvp about the maps.

Random bads need to be able to be left out for ranked PvP to work

OP has some good ideas. However, I will not participate in ranked warzones until Bioware lets us queue a full group of 8. I am tired of going into a warzone with 3 other guild members, and halfway through the fight realizing that we are the only people attempting to win while others randomly pvp about the maps.

 

Random bads need to be able to be left out for ranked PvP to work

- Don't give a !@#$%^ about the mini games and just want to "pwn" people and be recognized as a deadly/skilled opponent? Focus on the things that raise your Personal Rank.

Yeah, the OP has some great ideas, huh?

Currently, the medal system is one way to rank a person. In my opinion, and many others, it just isn't fleshed out enough, and some things need to be changed.

The medals are there to "gauge how well you performed" as well as the objectives part of the end-total screen. The problem with the way that it is currently implemented has a few points to look at:

Medals

The purpose is to show what a player has done to excel in one particular area of any given situation/warzone. Be it, they have healed someone for 2.5k in one shot, is not a "how good" they are. It is just a medal that would be awarded for excellence, as if we were in grade school again and the achievement awards for the most push-ups are in swtor.

Medals should not be used to show how good a person is, in order to award them for doing something good, as players can and will exploit their purpose to their own ends. It happens now already.

Objectives

Objectives are one good way to show what a person is doing, however, the way the games seem to calculate these objectives is flawed. If a person is capturing a point, or sitting and defending a point, they are getting objective points. There is nothing to say that a person who is killing people on the way to an objective area is doing any good. Therefore, if you stand on the objective, your objective score goes up. In the case of Huttball, the objectives seem to be easier to calculate. Interception of the ball, passing the ball, scoring a goal, killing a ball carrier are all ways that could be used to judge how well any given player is participating. The problem is, if you take killing a ball carrier into account, a lot of people could help kill a carrier, but the person getting the killing blow gets the objective score. That way it is a flawed point system.

Kills/Deaths/Killing Blows

Some sort of ratio could be said about how a player is doing in a warzone, be it they have gotten 10 killing blows and 1 death, they could be 90% effective. The fault in using this system, is win-trading exploitations will arise, especially when they introduce a full 8-man pre-made into the mix. There is also the chance that an afk person will sit there, and with no way to report/kick them out yet, they will have lots of kills, lots of deaths and no killing blows. Which might be good for some, but the ratio would probably still give them "something" for being afk. But that's another issue altogether.

Commendation Awarding

So, the way in which they determine currently, what amount of objectives/medals/kills/etc give what amount of commendations, is what is eating people up. Not being ranked has really nothing to do with this, other than a person who might not be playing as well as they are, is getting the same amount or more for doing less (in their eyes) than they are. And it bothers people. To help award, all of the above methods combined, and some massive formula would essentially put some kind of a silent-rank system, where if a person performs well, they get more commendations. That means they would obtain gear faster, but currently there is no way to gauge what exactly causes a person to get X commendations. There is no reliable method of calculating it. It doesn't give you the same commendation amounts for killing 30 people and not dying, as it would to say get 15 medals and no kills. You could heal 15 times and do 2.5k each time, but you may or may not get as many commendations as the guy who killed 30 people as you were healing them.

Without knowing how their system is calculating it, it's hard to say where to go from here.

Putting people into Ranked groups might help, but if they use the same system they use for commendation calculations, then it's just putting a tiny band-aid on a large gaping wound. It is not effective. So, people can put all of these design systems in place on the forums, say they need ranking systems, but it's very difficult to help them build on a system that doesn't work in a specific fashion now, and try to append to it to do something else.

Currently, the medal system is one way to rank a person. In my opinion, and many others, it just isn't fleshed out enough, and some things need to be changed.

As I said in the OP, I would not use the existing medal system, as-is, for the Ranking System.

They could, possibly, add a new type of medal which is used, but its not required to come up with an effective ranking system.

As I said in the OP, you will have players who play differently. Rather than have 1 uniform ranking system, have 2, one oriented around Personal PvP (the actual act of engaging in combat vs. another player, to the death), and one oriented around being a team player and winning the game (score is the largest factor here, since score determines winner and loser, but you could have other things which factor into team rank, if that thing requires team effort to achieve).

Personal Score: this would solely revolve around your personal actions. They could measure damage/healing (to be fair to healers), kills, deaths, even time spent "in combat" vs "time spend out of combat" as a ratio. I dunno, I'm just tossing ideas out there. But whatever measures they use, they should ignore goals/objectives and only measure your own actions.

Team Score: the opposite, nothing you do which affects only you personally should be factored into the score. If it affects your team as a whole, it could be used, such as guarding, or healing. But I would think the primary measurement here is end game score. i.e. 0-6 for huttball/voidstar, or for Civil War, score/100 (0-600 would become 0-6). You could factor in things like "carry ball", "complete pass", plant bomb, diffuse bomb, cap turret, etc. also, but you have to be careful you don't compensate selfish play (don't want to encourage ball hogging, for example).

I like the ranking system as it is ;o

There is no ranking system in SWTOR.